The Apocalypse Started Today, but I've Lived It for Ten Year

First Blood

The Alpha Beast didn't charge. That was the first thing I noticed, and the first thing that worried me.

In my memory, Tier-1 Alphas were stupid. They ran at the nearest heartbeat and kept running until something stopped them, and ten thousand people had died learning that. This one stood at the far end of the alley, tasting the air through that vertical mouth, and watched me the way a butcher watches a cut of meat.

(Quest Started: First Blood. Slay the Tier-1 Alpha Beast. Time Remaining: 04:51)

Translucent text hung in the corner of my vision, exactly where I remembered. I ignored it. A dead man's habit: never look at the clock while something is looking at you.

"Come on," I murmured. "You're early. Let's see why."

It moved.

Not a charge but a lunge, low and fast, so much faster than the one in my memory that my mind knew where it was going a full half-second before my body agreed. Ten years of instinct screamed *left*. Twenty-four years of soft muscle answered *late*.

Claws raked the brick where my head had been. Sparks and powdered mortar sprayed my face. I rolled across wet concrete, came up on one knee, and swung the axe blind. The blade skated off its shoulder with a sound like a hammer hitting a car door.

*Not enough. Not nearly enough.*

It spun and came again, and this time I was ready. I wasn't fast enough to dodge, so I didn't try. I drove my shoulder into the nearest dumpster, shoved with everything the body had, and the steel box screeched forward across the wet ground and caught the beast square in the forelegs.

It staggered, and I swung.

The axe bit this time, deep into the meat of its foreleg, and the scream that came out of that mouth hit me like a physical blow. My ears rang. The handle jumped in my hands. Black blood sprayed the wall in a long, steaming arc.

Then something slammed into my ribs.

I didn't see the claw. I only felt the heat, a clean line of it across my left side, and then the cold behind the heat, and then the ground hitting me in the back. The air left my lungs in one ugly rush. I lay there with the purple sky spinning overhead, tasting copper, and thought with absurd clarity: *You idiot. You are twenty-four years old and you've never been in a real fight.*

The body had no stamina. That was the problem. In my last life I could fight for six hours on a few mouthfuls of water. This body had been breathing espresso steam and pastry flour two minutes ago, and already my lungs felt scraped raw.

**[Time Remaining: 03:22]**

Heavy footsteps. The beast limped toward me, dragging the wounded leg, yellow eye fixed on my throat. It was in no hurry. It had figured out I was prey.

I almost laughed.

Because I'd just seen it. When it committed to a strike, its right shoulder dipped, barely, a hitch of muscle that took a quarter-second. I'd learned that tell in year two, from a nest of these things in a flooded parking garage, after losing three friends to understand it.

And Alphas could only attack in a straight line. Always. Once they leapt, they could not change direction.

I rolled onto my stomach, got a palm on the wet concrete, and stood. Pain flared along my ribs. I let it. Pain was only information, and I had spent a decade learning to read it without flinching.

The beast saw me rise and dropped its head.

Dip.

I was already moving. I kicked the dumpster's brake lever and shoved the whole box sideways into the beast's path. It didn't slow. It leapt, a ton of muscle and teeth sailing up and over the steel, committed, helpless, straight at the place where my chest had been.

I wasn't there.

I stepped inside the arc, planted my feet, and swung the axe upward with every ounce of the body I had.

The blade went in under its jaw.

It went in to the haft. Hot, black blood poured over my arms. The beast hit me and we went down together, and for one horrible second I was pinned under a convulsing mountain of flesh, the vertical mouth snapping inches from my face, the stink of rot and copper filling my nose. Its yellow eye rolled toward me.

I dragged the axe free, braced it in both hands, and drove the blade into that eye.

It shuddered once. Twice.

Then the alley went quiet, except for the distant sirens and the sound of me trying to breathe.

I lay there for a long moment, pinned beneath a carcass, staring up at that bruised sky. My side was on fire. My arms were shaking. And in my chest, somewhere beneath all the ash and the years, something small and warm lit up, because I had won. Twenty-four-year-old hands had killed a monster. It was a lousy, ugly, barely-survived kind of win, but it was mine.

[Time Remaining: 02:07]

[Quest Complete: First Blood.]

[Tier-1 Alpha Beast slain. Hidden Reward unlocked.]

I rolled out from under the corpse and staggered to my feet. The body was already dissolving, the flesh unraveling into motes of grey light that drifted up toward the purple sky. I had watched ten thousand monsters die that way. It had never stopped being strange.

Where the beast had been, something solid took shape on the wet concrete.

A chest.

Iron-black, about the size of a toolbox, bound with pale metal that gleamed like old bone. And carved into the lid was a shape I knew better than my own face. A crown with no head beneath it. Hollow at the center, its points thorned and bent inward.

My stomach turned.

I had seen that crown on banners. I had seen it stitched across the cloaks of the people who knelt in the dirt of the Eastern Wastes, because the man who wore its power had made them kneel. I had spent four years of my last life hunting that symbol.

And now it sat at my feet, and nobody on Earth knew it existed but me.

My hand moved on its own. I crouched, ignored the blood running down my ribs, and rested my fingers on the cold lid.

The chest hummed.

Down the street, a scream cut off abruptly. Somewhere, glass shattered. I barely heard any of it. My own pulse was thudding in my ears, because I knew what came next. I had heard it described a hundred times, by a hundred survivors who all agreed on one thing:

The System never spoke twice. It spoke to all humanity, in the same flat, empty voice, and never to one person alone.

The lid swung open without a sound. Light spilled out, gold and pale, and with it came a voice that was not flat, not cold, not empty.

It was warm. Almost fond.

And it said my name.

[Welcome back, Ethan Cole.]

I froze.

In ten years of apocalypse, I had never once heard the System address a human being by name. Not one. Not ever.

Until now.